Nintendo's new business plan: A health 'platform'

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Harriet Green

A day after Nintendo announced tumbling profits on the back of lacklustre Wii U sales, company president Satoru Iwata has announced, while speaking in Tokyo, that the video game maker is planning to work on a health product to improve customers' quality of life.

Unveiling the firm's new strategy for growth, he didn’t give details on what he termed his "quality of life" business plan, except for divulging that a product wouldn't be a wearable device.

Iwata said that he wants to bypass traditional consoles, smart devices and wearables to make non-wearable technology.

In terms of embellishment, he only offered the information that a health "platform" would be launched by April 2015 and that it wouldn’t "necessarily [be] something you will use in the living room".

Iwata has refused to step down or slash prices, despite Nintendo reporting distinctly lacklustre earnings of 10.2bn yen (£60m) from April to to December, down from 14.55bm yen a year earlier.

Nintendo sold 2.4m Wii U units in the nine months from April to December, slowing from the 3m units it sold in the same period of 2012.

He will, however, take a 50 per cent pay reduction, on top of the 50 per cent pay cut that he’d taken after Nintendo 3DS’s launch flopped. Other executives will take cuts of 20-30 per cent.

Iwata also made it very clear that Nintendo intends to stick to its tradition strategy:

"Following others into the exceedingly crowded market of mobile applications or the market of wearable technology that is expected to become increasingly competitive and fighting with brute force is not our way of doing business."

Shares in the Japanese company fell four per cent after the briefing, suggesting investors still need to be convinced that the company has a solid way forward.